Simone Fary said:
<<2) lack of equal opportunity leechery. I used to be
bothered by reviewers who were constantly describing the
physical attributes of the actresses. A recent reviewer
(female, by the way) describe the size of Demi Moore's
attributes in the movie Striptease. Upon further
reflection, those are probably the main reason that
alot of people are going to see that movie, so why not
tell people about them? But, believe it or not, many
women also go to movies to ogle the actors, and I find
little mention of this. I remember hearing a female
reviewer on a radio talk show mention that the main
appeal of "Last of the Mohicans" was seeing 2 hours of
Daniel Day Lewis with his shirt off, to the shock of
the male reviewers present.>>
The problem would seem to be a lack of female reviewers. Is the
field dominated by men, a male perspective (or "gaze" if you
prefer)? (And personally I thought Demi's stripteases were
really dull. But Ving Rhames and Burt Reynolds made the movie
watchable).
<<4) Reviewers who deem a movie "not funny" because
the humor presented doesn't appeal to them personally.
There are many different types of humor - some people
can't stand Benny Hill, or Monty Python, but to call
them "not funny" seems to me most unhelpful to the
people who do like that kind of humor.>>
Yet there are many innocuous comedies which are simply *not funny*.
They're often full of tired jokes that wore out two or three movies
ago.
On a related note, I'm not nearly as annoyed by reviews as I am by
the use of excerpts (often taken out of context) in trailers and ads.
I've begun to wonder if some relatively unknown reviewers praise bad
movies just to get their names in those ads. Anybody got thoughts on
how the widespread practice of "sound bite reviews" has changed the
relationships among the reviewer, the reviewee, and the audience.
Chris Pyle
U of Ky.
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